(Bold mine)

Hmmmm. A parable about bells and cats comes to mind.

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Gimme a minute to read through Jay's latest observations...

Texas.

a quick look at wiki says carbamates do the same thing as diazinon, so they may work just as well. I havent looked for quite a while, so for all I know the stuff was illegal, but isnt now.

Like I said tho, I have never seen a fire ant hill survive a generous application of diazinon. I would like to know if carbamates work just as well.

This talk about chemicals is all well and good but I'm thinkin' back to when I was 10 years old. If only I'd known, what I could have done with a car battery and a big honkin' magnifying glass...

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Brett
Peters Creek, Alaska

I ran across references to another paper that refutes that they are attracted to electric fields. I wish I could find the original papers themselves and get it from the horses mouth. :sigh:

At any rate, from what I read, they placed fire ants in electric fields but took care to make sure they were completely insulated with no possibility of conduction current flowing. They found no difference in behavior.

What they did find was that indeed, it was actual shocking, conduction current through the ants that triggered the behavior. The paper described them as becoming "deranged", which agrees with previous descriptions of "being like a drug", where they abandon their normal behavior and just go nuts around the electrical equipment.

Apparently, in the their "deranged" state, they release pheromones like crazy (probably the equivalent of us hearing and seeing someone acting wild) and all their buddies come to see what the fuss is about. That gets the party started. And, again from what I read, they found as little 5V shocking potential is enough to trigger the response (that's actually not surprising really, as little 1VAC potential is enought to cause livestock distress, usually in the from of an exposed conduit, or other grounded metal, to earth/soil potential due to neutral voltage drop, or other stray voltage problems. That small of a potential, which most humans wouldn't even notice, is enough to cause milk production to drop in dairy cows).

So they get a little tingle and it drives 'em wild.

-Richard

Seems odd to me that cows are so sensitive to electric currents yet can rip their hide on barbed wire without so much as a whimper. Perhaps it explains their behaviour prior to electrical storms. (or earthquakes as some suggest)

I tend to accept the chemical stimulation idea much easier than ants being attracted to electric fields. Never heard of any creature attracted to electric energy. But a dying ant may release a barrage of chemicals both as a defense and as a signal to the others, which may produce a "protect the colony" frenzy.

Well, sharks have sensors that detect electrical and magnetic fields as do platypus. They use these to detect prey hiding under the ground. Sharks at least (never read anything specificly about this happening with platypus) have been attracted to electrical cablle.However, this was in a specific study, I do not know if it happens in the wild.

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If electric currents (or electric shocks) really attract fire ants, it seems to me like a clever inventor could construct a device that would attract fire ants and then kill them, much like a bug-zapper attracts and kills flying insects. Patent it, then manufacture it, and you can make a fortune selling them if they work. It would have to be something that shocks them, kills them, and then somehow clears the dead ant residue so that more ants could be attracted and killed in unlimited quantities. Use their swarming propensities against them. It would be nice to be able to buy a battery-powered gizmo that you can place near a mound and wipe them all out as they attack the electric attractant. It might not get the queen, but maybe it's enough to eliminate 99% of the worker ants.

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It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
--Arthur C. Clarke

I'm sorry to hear that.